They’ve been intentionally filling up the dam to cause maximum damage: https://hydroweb.theia-land.fr/hydroweb/view/L_kakhovka?lang=en , https://tweet.lambda.dance/NOELreports/status/1666012180217462785#m

Also the constant shelling of civilian population in Kherson ever since they’ve been pushed out. You know, the Kherson they say is part of Russia. (Same with Zaporizhia).

And they’re not treating people of occupied territories as ‘their people’ anyway - no free movement with Russia itself.

(Also, you can’t destroy a dam like this by ‘shelling’. It takes a very big bomb or intentional demolition to do that, and Russians have been controlling the dam for a long time.)

EDIT: and they’re shelling Kherson right now as evacuation is taking place.

• X series - most complicated spacesims in existence (nothing realistic though)
• Stellaris
• Imperium Galactica 1 - a super-complicated 4x space DOS game - think Stellaris + SimCity + Command & Conquer
• An obscure unpopular old game - Battle Isle: the Andosia War - or as one reviewer roughly said: “they must have had a board where everyone who came up with an idea got a golden piggie - it would work as 3 games: Battle Isle, Economy Isle, and Energypipe Isle, but this is just too much”. Basically a turn-based but real-time strategy game (unit movement is turn-based, you can end your turn at any time but… resource extraction is real-time and if you run out of energy and water simultaneously you can’t cool your power plant and you can’t power your pumps). Also maintaining a supply-line behind your advancing army.

As another steam deck user (~1 year of 1-4h daily usage):

performance/compatibility:

• modern AAA games can be played but expect low settings and 30FPS. I don’t play many of those so it’s not a problem
• indies work, with good battery life
• old PC games work well, e.g. Fallout 2 on Steam out of the box - the trackpads are important here to replace mouse. Don’t expect to play a micro-heavy RTS though.
• AAA games from 2012-2020 (~PS4 generation) work with good enough battery life for my commute (~1+1h)
• setup of emulators is trivial with EmuDeck
• switch emulation works (a recent yuzu update bumped performance to ‘as good as switch’ for almost everything.
• PS2, PSP, Wii (and everything older) emulation works, but don’t expect PS3 to work
• most multiplayer games with anticheat don’t work
• modding windows games (outside those with Steam Workshop support) is impractical, you need to go into desktop mode and mess with the particular proton ‘bottle’ for that game
• adding third-party games is easy (add the game’s binary to steam and tell it which Proton to use)

ergonomics/size:

• it’s big, not laptop big, but a backpack is the most practical way to carry it (I carry it with my work laptop)
• It’s really comfortable to hold - personally it’s more comfortable than my Logitech F710 (controller) - but I have big hands

reliability/stability:

• no SW issues so far, good cadence of updates
• no analog stick drift so far
• no measurable battery degradation so far

hardware:

• not the easiest device to take apart (e.g. if you want to upgrade the SSD)

other:

• a good big uSD card may be preferable to buying the most expensive model, I have e.g. Witcher 3 on an uSD card and loading is (subjectively) fast enough.
• steam has per-game controller schemes which you can download from other users, this is especially convenient for strategy games where there’s no ‘common scheme’
• you can set screen refresh rate and FPS limit per-game, e.g. for turn-based games I go way down with FPS (~20) to save battery
• people complain about the screen, IMO it’s comparable with any ‘normal’, non-OLED monitor

There’s also a considerable dev community around Steam Deck, e.g. decky-loader for plugins, and already mentioned EmuDeck.

• https://gamingonlinux.com has been my ‘main’ gaming news source in recent years.
• https://gamebanshee.com for obscure RPG news
• https://ppmsite.com for Command & Conquer series mods

I’m probably missing some games, but:

• Homeworld and sequels (especially Cataclysm!) - one of the few and still the best 3D strategy game.
• Deus Ex - you can do anything and the game will react to it. You can run from bosses and they will follow you later (or you can kill them in advance!), you can stack all the crates to get to that roof, you can be in the middle of what in any other RPG would be the heartwrenching scripted sequence motivating the main character and start shooting. There are still no other games allowing freedom to such degree.
• Planescape: Torment - where dialogue actually feels like gameplay.
• Xenogears and to a lesser degree, newer Xeno games. Goes outside of the mold for japanese RPGs similar to Planescape:Torment in the west.
• Battle for Wesnoth - the best turn-based strategy, with a whole series worth of quality campaigns, and with some of the unofficial campaigns surpassing the main game. Also the best open source game.

There are many others (XCOM:UFO Defense, Sacrifice, Final Fantasy series, Command & Conquer TS/RA2 and their mods, Fallout 2, Stellaris, Dishonored, Mass Effect, Unreal Tournament, Operation Flashpoint…)

I think we’re soon going to get to the point when anything other than solar/wind gets rejected on the financial basis, except cases not covered by solar/wind (still need some baseload).

As solar gets cheaper, even baseload/heating should be viable - there are many energy storage methods that are ‘inefficient’ but scale better than li-ion - thermal storage, various ‘heavy’ battery chemistries, even making hydrogen or synfuels - you can have 50% energy loss if it costs 50% of the alternatives and you’d be unable to use it on peak sunlight anyway.